Free Dead Water by Simon Ings Page A

remember well enough. The problem is what they remember. It will not fall into words. Logic will not parse it. It is story-proof.
    Yesterday she was weaving past cooking fires in the parking lot, shouldering through knots of weeping, jabbering relatives in the corridors. Today’s rota has her at Pushpanjali Hospital, talking to the private sector. A better class of paraplegic. A more educated burns victim. While she waits for the ward sister to admit her, she picks up a magazine. It is not one you often see. Not
Cine Blitz
, not
Sportsworld
. It has been dropped here by a recent visitor. A British colour supplement. She reads:
Young, frustrated, politically engaged, Hardik Singh has amassed a file of misdemeanours following trouble at rallies of one sort or another. Now his saffron-dyed politics have achieved legitimacy. He is a hero, and his cause is one the city’s liberal intelligentsia can no longer belittle.
Within minutes of the explosions, the RSS were pulling people out of the rubble and tearing the injured free of mangled vehicle wreckage. Long before the ambulances got there, the RSS’s trained first-aiders were hammering hearts to life again and kissing breath into deflated lungs. RSS boys gathered maimed and bleeding children in their arms and ran relays, bearing them to hospitals at a speed the city’s rescue crews could not match. Fire trucks arrived to find that local RSS boys had put out their fires with nothing more than blankets and dirt. It was what RSS shakhas all over the city had been training for, planning for (cynics said, hoping for). It is their finest hour, and Hardik Singh, covered in filth and soot and other people’s blood, and obviously annoyed by my questions, knows it.
     
    In the photograph Hardik is standing in front of a wrecked car. He has been saving the injured. He is smeared with other people’s blood. The photographer has captured him shouting orders. His delicate face is distorted by a fierce intensity.
    Riots begin in earnest a few weeks later. Whole streets burn. Entire families roast. Hardik is arrested. He still thinks he’s a hero. Roopa watches him in the holding cell. Milling there with a dozen others, already he has the poise and dignity of a political prisoner.
    Roopa speaks to the desk sergeant, then goes and waits outside the station for Hardik to come out. There are Tempos and mopeds pulled up outside the front gate. There are boys: RSS and Shiv Sena. When Hardik comes out, a free man, he ignores their cheers. He hunts the crowd. He spots her. He walks towards her.
    Roopa snaps to attention: her father’s daughter. She is as tall as he is. He stands before her for the longest time, looking at her. She wishes he would say something. She wishes he would take her hand, at least.
    And he does.
    Bombay’s Anti-Corruption Bureau (‘Raise your voice and it shall be heard!’) operates out of an industrial estate in Worli, next door to Raj Electricals. The ACB has a twofold remit: to weed out government corruption, and to tackle the city’s long-established mafias. Organized crime in Bombay is divided along religious lines. The Muslim syndicates receive clandestine backing from Pakistan’s intelligence community and pose a serious terrorist threat to the Indian state. The saffronist mafias have connections to domestic far-right groups and hide beneath a banner of Hindu patriotism.
    Of the saffronist families currently operating in Bombay, the Yadavs are the most notorious. The ACB has files on the Yadav family going back to Partition. Whole careers have been expended poring over the family’s business affairs, its influence in the port, its political connections. ‘The deepest fissure in Bombay’s black economy is the traditional rivalry between the Indian Ocean commercial–criminal nexus and the landbased nexus stretching from Bombay to Delhi to Kashmir. The Yash syndicate has begun to square this circle for itself, through a programme of intimidation,